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Snowflake’s Mandarin Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes  Studies: Mandarin | Message 65 of 740 07 December 2008 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I going to use my college reading text (Yale Mirror series) in combination with the Harbaugh book to work on characters. One thing I've learned in the past few months, which may be related to my older age, is that learning singleton characters out of context pretty much leads to more things that I find easier to forget. I think my problem is that the time gap from when I learn the character to when I start recognizing the usage in my audios is a bit too long. Typically separating out pieces, working them each individually and then piecing together works extremely well (ala Heisig, which happens to be an ABA approach). But another aspect is that the plan has to be adapted for the subject (me). Mining sentences and writing them in characters helps but it hasn't been enough for me. Edited by Snowflake on 07 December 2008 at 9:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 66 of 740 09 December 2008 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's interesting using my old college text. The material was originally written in the 1950's. For inside, 裏頭 (li3 tou5, simplified 里头) is used instead of 裡面(li3 mian4, simplified 里面). 一塊兒 (yi2 kuai4-r, simplified 一块儿) is used for together instead of 一齊 (yi1 qi2, simplified 一齐). 裡面 and 一齊 are what I'm hearing in the movies. I'm glad to have gotten some listening work in before starting this book.
On a different note, this weekend I discovered that my mother can read and write simplified characters. She was looking at something I had written in traditional characters and then offered the simplified forms as options. Turns out she learned both simplified and traditional characters in school (mainland pre-1949). I had always assumed she knew only the traditional characters. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 67 of 740 12 December 2008 at 5:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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This week have been hitting SAFMEDS (minus graphing) every other day, alternated with reading the college text. Have made it thru 5 chapters out of 20 (volume 1 which has 300 characters). Part of me says I should go faster while I can. That’s because the characters are easier in the beginning, as is the vocabulary, though am finding so much that I’ve forgotten (depressing). Several people have said not to worry, that it will come back...hope they are right. Have a friend who is visiting Taiwan, for several months, who hopefully can bring back elementary school material. She suggested it; I wouldn't have thought of that. She's been getting these sort of materials for her own kids. Hopefully the weight of the books, in her luggage, won't be a problem. Then was looking at http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2008/09/14/how-long-doe s-it-take-to-learn-fluent-mandarin/. Seems that my reading approach right now is similiar to what he did.
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| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 68 of 740 14 December 2008 at 4:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm half-way through the first reading book and my listening comprehension has jumped a notch. At the moment, I'm thankful that the author of the reading text is a native speaker, or at least I think he is given his name and his other books (like one on reading cursive Chinese). I've Premacked my reading, which here is read a chapter and then watch a Mandarin DVD that I'm really interested in. Character work is my least favorite part of Chinese so keeping up motivation is a constant struggle. My progress in the readings should go slower after this.
I'm also working through numbers like 四萬萬五千萬 (450 million, simplified 四万万五千万) which showed in my reading. An interesting note is that some of the words in the reading text are not showing up in many of the online dictionaries I use. I search these dictionaries when verifying my Pinyin as the book uses Yale romanization. These words are showing up in the yellowbridge dictionary. Edited by Snowflake on 15 December 2008 at 11:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 69 of 740 17 December 2008 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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After my small eureka moment Sunday morning (listening comprehension jump) I got more motivated about reading when the light bulb temporarily went on yesterday. I found myself mentally, automatically, simultaneously, translating a sentence as I heard it in a movie. I was astonished. I think most of this is related to time (reaching critical mass) with the readings pushing things over the edge as I'm doing less listening work due to my job. So I looked at some more books in the same vein.... books which build character recognition that use romanization mixed with characters. The more advanced material uses little to no romanization mixed in with the characters. Plus all these materials purposely, periodically, repeat characters from previous lessons....sort of a variation on a SRS. With these little light bulb clicks, I have stopped moaning about my friend from Beijing transferring to an out of town project. Edited by Snowflake on 18 December 2008 at 9:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 70 of 740 18 December 2008 at 8:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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OK, planning on buying the 3rd reader which reaches the 1000 character level, after I start the 2nd reader. I'm on chapter 15, out of 20, in the first book. I have the first 2 readers and some supplementary books in the series. They are all older editions. I've run into 2-3 characters that are written differently in Harbaugh, slightly fewer strokes or having one less radical. It will be nice to get whatever edition is current for the 3rd reader. I was looking for the sequence for this series, after the 3rd reader, and came across a blurb that mentioned the series is anachronistic. That is not surprizing. The first publication was after the revolution. China has changed a lot since then. The age probably would bother other people though I don't mind. I've seen that updating language is pretty easy. Also this material basically reflects my parents' generation.
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| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 5994 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 71 of 740 19 December 2008 at 5:14am | IP Logged | ||
This is not related to your old age. I can't understand how people could learn characters out of context, from an HSK list or something. I look at it this way (assuming you want a decent size vocab of useful words); Learning characters from a list = 1) Memorize a character 2) get a word from the character which may or may not be useful, 3) come across/learn a useful word 4) look at the word and see if you know the charactes, 5) learn the characters of the useful word, or 6) try to make a new association to a new word based on the same character. Meanwhile, learning words first WITH their characters = 1) Learn a useful (common) word 2) Learn their characters and assicate them with that word. 3) Come across a different useful word, learn its characters or 6) make a different association with a character you already know to another useful word. Obviously this is a superior way. Less steps, less useless assciations for your mind, more context, and more useful words. Your mind will recognize words, not characters. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5903 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 72 of 740 20 December 2008 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, thank you for trying to make me feel better about my age.
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